Jason Green writes about The Promise, Progress, And Pain Of Collaboration Software:

Given the explosion of communication, conversations can take place simultaneously over several competing channels, creating confusion and inefficiency by requiring multiple changes in context. In addition, the ability to access prior content easily and seamlessly across all these communication channels becomes more challenging.

Between email, Trello, Slack, and InVision, we’re definitely feeling this pain as well. App Fatigue, indeed.

Jason Kottke in The revenge of the nerds:

On the very public stage of the web, the nerds of the world finally had something to offer the world that was cool and useful and even lucrative. The web has since been overrun by marketers, money, and big business, but for a brief time, the nerds of the world had millions of people gathered around them, boggling at their skill with this seemingly infinite medium.

There’s been a lot of talk about the web we lost in recent months. It’s now gone mainstream with TechCrunch calling the phenomenon The Fourth Internet:

If the first Internet was “Getting information online,” the second was “Getting the information organized” and the third was “Getting everyone connected” the fourth is definitely “Get mine.” Which is a trap.

I certainly understand where everyone is coming from with this. I also go on about the importance of self-publishing on your own domain (or as Jeremy Keith calls it, “selfish publishing”). And I also miss the old Twitter, back when it was about discussions and sharing knowledge, and not about big brands taking over our feeds with promoted photos.

But we also have to remember that the web is always going to be an Eternal September. So many new people are coming online every day, and they don’t know our “rules”, so they make up their own. And as much as we might long for earlier days, that’s how progress happens — through the actions of people who don’t know what they’re supposed to do.

So, sure. Let’s continue to publish on our own sites, and shout loudly about the virtues of doing so. But let’s not make people feel like unwanted newbies when they dream up a different web. We need them as much as they need us.

I found Ellis Hamburger’s view on what’s wrong with Facebook quite interesting. From Facebook’s friend problem:

In the real world, losing touch with people happens naturally and effortlessly, but on Facebook, unfriending is reserved only for breakups and acts of malice. So, the ghosts floating through my News Feed vastly outnumber the friends I’ve kept. My Friends list went from a roster of my current friends to a collection of everyone I’ve met in the last 10 years — a social group too massive to feel urgent, and too broad to share with on a daily basis.

Facebook is broken for its earliest users, and perhaps soon, for many of its new ones as well.

Paul Ford’s The Great Works of Software is definitely going on my “Best of 2014” list:

The greatest works of software are not just code or programs, but social, expressive, human languages. They give us a shared set of norms and tools for expressing our ideas about words, or images, or software development. Great software gives us tremendous freedom, as long as we work within its boundaries.

Seriously, read the whole thing…

In The Surprisingly Large Cost of Telling Small Lies Rebekah Campbell looks at the problem with lying in the context of entrepreneurship and creating products:

Peter maintains that telling lies is the No. 1 reason entrepreneurs fail. Not because telling lies makes you a bad person but because the act of lying plucks you from the present, preventing you from facing what is really going on in your world. Every time you overreport a metric, underreport a cost, are less than honest with a client or a member of your team, you create a false reality and you start living in it.

And it’s extremely difficult to get out of that reality once you’ve created it.

We all know how destructive interruptions at work are, and how a constant pressure to always be online increases stress levels exponentially. The thing is, we can fix this problem. Clive Thompson asks Are You Checking Work Email in Bed? At the Dinner Table? On Vacation? and reports on a recent study to measure the effects of changing that behavior:

[Harvard professor Leslie] Perlow suggested they carve out periods of “predictable time off”—evening and weekend periods where team members would be out of bounds. Nobody was allowed to ping them. The rule would be strictly enforced, to ensure they could actually be free of that floating “What if someone’s contacting me?” feeling.

The results were immediate and powerful. The employees exhibited significantly lower stress levels. Time off actually rejuvenated them: More than half said they were excited to get to work in the morning, nearly double the number who said so before the policy change. And the proportion of consultants who said they were satisfied with their jobs leaped from 49 percent to 72 percent. Most remarkably, their weekly work hours actually shrank by 11 percent—without any loss in productivity. “What happens when you constrain time?” Lovich asks. “The low-value stuff goes away,” but the crucial work still gets done.

More of this in our workplaces, please.

Mat Honan’s Are Touchscreens Melting Your Kid’s Brain?1 set off the latest in what has become a recurring tech theme over the past few years:

I’m perpetually distracted, staring into my hand, ignoring the people around me. Hit Refresh and get a reward, monkey. Feed the media and it will nourish you with @replies and Likes until you’re hungry and bleary and up way too late alone in bed, locked in the feedback loop. What will my daughter’s loop look like? I’m afraid to find out.

This has been a difficult topic for me for a long time. In 2012 I wrote an article for Smashing Magazine called A Dad’s Plea To Developers Of iPad Apps For Children, in which I aired some of my frustrations with apps for kids. That piece brought out a lot of anger, including a comment that I’ll never forget:

Wow really?? great parents here.. having a kid under 7 stare at a screen, really?? come on!! no kid under 7 should use an iPad for what?? play outside, play with your toys, your friends, read. People who have a 2yr old use an ipad/iphone, shouldn’t have kids in the first place! shame on you

I started writing a passionate reply, explaining our reasoning and the rules my wife and I have for screen time, but I ended up just dropping it. No one has ever changed their opinion based on a comment they read on a blog, so why bother.

Anyway, I digress. I tend to agree with Robert McGinley Myers’ response to Mat’s article. In Screens Aren’t Evil (which you should read in its entirety) he says:

But we need to get beyond worrying about whether “screens” are melting our kids’ brains. What we need to be conscious of is encouraging our kids, and ourselves, to engage in activities that enrich us. Sometimes that’s interacting with each other, sometimes that’s a hike in the forest, sometimes thats a great book, and sometimes that’s an incredible video game. It’s not the medium that matters, but what we take from it.

Now that’s a moderate stance I can get behind.

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1. Betteridge’s law alert! ↩

I love this quote from Suzanne Slatcher, who worked at Pixar in the early years. From the really interesting article Building The Next Pixar:

“Business is just an idea, like a movie,” says Slatcher. “What if we did this in this place at this time, in this style of packaging, with this choice of flavors? Would it work? There’s still a back and forth between creative and the audience, and you can’t be like ‘if I build it, they will come.’ No, we’re in a democratic world where everyone has opinions. If you’re making your cartoon and your joke’s not funny, it’s just not funny, it has to go. If people don’t like a flavor, they’re right, we’re not right.”

That last sentence is a key concept in product development as well. If people don’t like our “flavor” of product, they’re right and we’re wrong. We have to fix it, not try to convince them that they don’t “get it”.

Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit by taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left.

— Marshall McLuhan

In other news, Google Glass is on sale today.

I had a particularly noisy weekend, so I’ve been thinking about silence quite a bit. This morning I came across Chloe Schama’s How Silence Became a Luxury Product, and it really resonated with me:

Unwanted noise is perhaps the most irksome form of sensory assault. A bothersome sight? Close your eyes or turn the other way — eyesores are, generally, immobile. An annoying taste? Spit it out. (Why was it in your mouth?) Sound, on the other hand, is ambient, elusive, enveloping. Even the softest drone can echo cacophonously if it worms itself into your head. Ulysses was not seduced by the sight of the sirens. Poe’s telltale heart does not torment with its smell. “Noise is the most impertinent of all forms of interruption,” groused the nineteenth-century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. “It is not only an interruption, but also a disruption of thought.”

The article goes on to explain how silence has become a commodity — one that people are willing to pay a lot of money for. I found the article through Atossa Araxia Abrahamian’s Enjoy the Silence, a great piece on the proliferation of noise-canceling headphones:

I also discovered that an artificially imposed lack of noise can make perfectly normal sounds—the hum of a fan, or a colleague’s phone conversation—feel like an assault on the senses. The quiet becomes habit-forming, and I’m not entirely convinced that that’s desirable. What good is it to live in the world if we just choose to ignore it?

The articles reminded me of Jeremy Mesiano-Crookston’s exploration of imposed silence in How Silence Works: Emailed Conversations With Four Trappist Monks. Here is how one monk answered the question What do you feel like silence adds to your actions?:

The silence does make me aware of my inner workings — what we call in the monastery, “self-knowledge.” I can’t pretend that I’m always a nice guy, always patient, always calm and receptive. I have to admit that I can be abrupt, cold to offenders, or would often prefer efficiency to the messiness of other people’s moods. Silence seems to keep me from idealizing myself.

Since we’re on the topic of silence we might as well look back to Pope Benedict XVI’s thoughts about it in his message for World Communications Day back in 2012:

Silence is an integral element of communication; in its absence, words rich in content cannot exist. In silence, we are better able to listen to and understand ourselves; ideas come to birth and acquire depth; we understand with greater clarity what it is we want to say and what we expect from others; and we choose how to express ourselves. By remaining silent we allow the other person to speak, to express him or herself; and we avoid being tied simply to our own words and ideas without them being adequately tested. In this way, space is created for mutual listening, and deeper human relationships become possible.